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Book #65: Our Only Chance by Ray Else

A different kind of Frankenstein.Einna is a lot like other teenage girls, naive, idealistic, secretive, disobedient and interested in boys. Only Einna is not human, she is an A.I. android. Her creator, her mother, is Manaka Yagami, the first female tech billionaire. Einna has a plan to make herself human, if she can keep Mother in the dark and avoid the clutches of the notorious Yakuza.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley for an honest review. What follows is my opinion. I was not compensated in any way.

I’ll be honest, this was one of those cases where the blurb sounded interesting, but the book failed me. I honestly didn’t care for Our Only Chance.

The book is written in third person with the three main players, Manaka Yagami, Einna, and Professor Aragawa. The story started off interesting enough with a professor looking for a protegee’, someone who was interested in biology and robotics. The plan was to make a viable android, one with a human brain. Sounds interesting enough?

What bothered me was the writing style. I couldn’t get into any of the characters. By 25% in, I was trying to scrape any kind of empathy for someone so I could continue reading. There was nothing for me to find.

The book itself felt like a homage to Japan, but not so much in the culture or making the characters human like. The human characters felt like anime characters. And I mean, anime made for a younger audience where there really isn’t much tension. I didn’t feel tension when the Yakuza came along. I didn’t feel the urgency Aragawa had about making the androids.